UNIT 12
Character Animation
Research
In this project, we will get to learn the different body mechanics and attempt to animate with the 11 rig. Despicable me is an animated film from Illumination Entertainment. Their style of animation is rather exaggerated like cartoons are and characters movements are fluid. It is animated in such a way that you are able to pick up on what is actually happing in the scene. The movements of the characters have this wobble look to them and always having anticipation style of animation.
Monsters Inc. created by Pixar-Disney has this way of adding realism to their animation making characters feel and move realistic and still using the older methods of animation. What I find interesting in this trailer is how the animators direct your attention from Mike when is talking and is doing all the action while Sully is listening to Mike, he is never really standing still there is always this sense of movement and makes it feel that more natural.
Pocoyo is another children's animation and has a unique style of animation. It is very fast movement and almost seems stop-motion like, moving from pose to pose. Pixar`s animations are more fluid than Pocoyo
In Noddy is an example of bad animation. Animation that is not polished having objects clipping through other objects, audio and lips syncing does not match up well. The movement of characters are rather floaty and slow, there are just so many things on screen that it is hard to take note of what exactly is going on.
Dispair
Character Posing
This project, we are introduced to the 11 rig for a character animation and just getting it learn the rig and how body mechanics work. The rig may look challenging at first, because of the introduction to rigging in my previous project it is not very daunting. We started to pose the character as a way to get an understanding of the 11 rig. The first pose was despair I did and was difficult trying understand how a person in despair would be.
Joy/Victory
After the I made the character in the position of despair, I understood the rig much better and its different functions. I wanted to make an extreme pose with more emotion and character holding something in his hand in a victory stance and one leg on a step or a box of some sort. Adding a light to the object made it glow in the render although there some issues with the mess and black squares were showing in the render. Changing some of the render settings did hide it but I had rendered out more than one because it was random.
Dispair 2
I was not too very keen on how the first despair pose come out. So I redid the pose with a less extreme position by just sitting down on a chair and adding the little details and using light to affect the scene. One of the rules of animation is the Line of Action. The line of Action is a representation of force being applied or directed by the body.
Anger
When I started on to pose the 11 rig for the anger I have looked at a lot more references and acting it out in front of mirro making the rig look as if it was about to fight.
Head turn animation
The head turn is a simple but complex movement to animate. Breaking it down into each part of the movement and knowing how a head would naturally turn and not robotically is quite difficult to do. Having a reference video or acting the motion out always help you to define what works naturally.
Walking and Animation Techniques
The walking animation is, in general, a hard thing to animate because you can animate a character walking in different ways. I have used the Animations Survival Kit. The book does a good breakdown of the walk cycle. The book also goes into body arcs and how it is important to having natural animation.
Waking cycles are normally hard to animate, the first technique I found it to be difficult to do by moving the hips first and having an ice-skating look but I found this to be complicated the timing was off so I decide to research other ways. I found that animating in a walk cycle in one spot was much easier. ( https://youtu.be/4WpY8JqTJuQ ) You able to copy existing frames and place it different on the timeline and you can loop the movement.
Picking up an object
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11 Second Animation
Storyboard
5
11 Second clip first
When animating the storyboard becomes very useful to plan out the movement to the audio clip. The clip I choose was from a scene in The Mask with Jim Carry. The film is rather energetic and I wanted to see how I could translate that to something else.
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